And in case the clerk of any court exercising naturalization jurisdiction collects fees in excess of the sum of six thousand dollars in any fiscal year, the Secretary of Labor may allow salaries, for naturalization purposes only, to pay for clerical assistance, to be selected and employed by that clerk, additional to the clerical force, for which clerks of courts are required by this section to pay from fees received by such clerks in naturalization proceedings, if in the opinion of said Secretary the naturalization business of such clerk warrants further additional assistance: Provided, That in no event shall the whole amount allowed the clerk of a court and his assistants exceed the one-half of the gross receipts of the office of said clerk from naturalization fees during such fiscal year.[87]
WHEN THE CLERK POCKETS THE FEES
The clerk is not required to spend for additional clerical force the portion of the fees under three thousand dollars retained by him. In some states he is required to surrender it as part of the income of his office; but generally speaking he can put it in his pocket if he chooses to do so, and allow the naturalization business to become clogged and delayed. Sometimes he does just that. The Naturalization Service has no redress, although it usually is blamed by the uninformed for the ensuing situation. Of course the alien has none, although he is the principal victim of it. The possibilities of the arrangement are well illustrated in one great Middle Western city, where there are two courts, one state and one Federal, performing naturalization functions. The clerk of the state court is very efficient and interested in the work; he spends more than $3,000 on naturalization business, employing a deputy at $1,800 and a stenographer at about $1,000 a year, and in rush periods having extra force. The service to aliens in that court is courteous, accurate, and expeditious. The clerk of the Federal court does otherwise. He retains his $3,000, but employs an assistant at only $1,200 without any stenographer, and the work is badly delayed. A letter of complaint about this court mentions the fact that “I have been advised by ... that the United States District Court will be closed all day to-day.” Day after day, during 1918–19, the office of the naturalization deputy clerk in that court was entirely closed, so far as the aliens were concerned, owing to the insufficiency of the clerical force. Generally, an overworked condition of a clerk’s office leads, naturally, to hurry, discourtesy, and inevitable delays, during which applicants and their witnesses will lose day after day of working time in waiting for attention.
FORMS OF PETTY GRAFT
This sort of thing leads also to another evil, inevitable in such an atmosphere. Petty officers of the court, policemen and others having the run of the building, will tyrannize over the crowds of aliens awaiting attention, and will pretend to have, or actually will exercise, the power to put one person ahead of another or otherwise effect an unfair discrimination in favor of those who will pay something for the advantage. In one court there was found a definite arrangement with a neighboring saloonkeeper, who collected the bribes for a guard in the Federal building. The Naturalization Service has been assiduous in its discouragement of this sort of thing, and has had a good measure of success upon the minor grafters; but as the law reads at present it can use only moral suasion upon the clerks of courts to induce them to spend the retained share of the fees for the purpose for which the retention obviously was authorized—the bona-fide employment of the extra clerical force needed to handle the naturalization business.
The “moral suasion” business, however, has its limitations. While the chief naturalization examiners, in charge of the districts in the field, usually are on cordial terms with the clerks of their various courts, the relations between the clerks and the office of the bureau at Washington, maintained almost exclusively by correspondence, with that correspondence almost invariably growing out of some complaint or dereliction on the part of the clerk, are not always so happy. The clerk has to send to Washington for all his supplies of blanks and other stationery used in the naturalization business. In one of the largest cities in the country there was a delay of weeks in getting certain supplies from Washington, and the petitioners suffered accordingly. The whole naturalization service is habitually short-handed and correspondingly overworked; but the penalty for the delays falls upon the head of the petitioner for naturalization. When a clerk of a small court, or a large one, has not on hand the blank forms upon which his declaration or petition must be written in order to be valid, the alien, who may have traveled with his witnesses scores of miles to file his paper, must return to his home and wait some more. This is an occurrence by no means infrequent.
Penalties are provided by law against clerks who fail to send punctually to Washington the required periodical reports and duplicates of papers. The Naturalization Bureau has been reluctant to attempt enforcement of these penalties—it is a bit drastic to fine a clerk $25 for a little delay in transmitting papers—and usually has been content to send an examiner to the court to get the material. But the correspondence growing out of such delays, and out of the effort to induce clerks to spend their retained share of the fees for clerical assistance, has added acerbity in many instances to the irksomeness of a task “not appurtenant to the office of clerk of court.”
Small irritations also add friction. For example, the clerk is required to send his reports and papers by registered mail; there is no provision to reimburse him for this; he can put in an expense bill—and maybe get it after a long delay. This is exasperating, whether one’s annual share of fees in a small office amounts to $10 or $3,000. There was a clerk in California who declined to answer letters or have anything further to do with the Bureau after he thought he had been badly treated in some such matter; he induced the judge of his court to relinquish naturalization jurisdiction, and then wrote to the Bureau that it could have the records in his custody if it would send for them. The Bureau has a highly detached, impersonal style of correspondence, admirably adapted to alienate human sentiment and blight human interest.
“PERSONAL EQUATION” IN THE NATURALIZATION SERVICE
The executive arm of the government has the right to appear before courts exercising naturalization jurisdiction, for the purpose, as the law says: